Our support will be closed for the summer holidays starting at July 19 2010 and re-opens again August 16 2010. We will answer your e-mails as usual during the working days, but the phone support will be closed.
Have a nice summer!
Category Archives: Anti-spam
Support closed on Friday 25 June
Please note that due to Midsummer’s holiday in Sweden, SpamDrain support will be closed on Friday 25 June and will open again on Monday 28 June, 9 am CET.
E-mail from Facebook is spam from Canadian pharmacy
From time to time we see that spammers tend to copy e-mail layouts and content from legitimate companies. We have reported about the Twitter spam messages as one example. Now, Facebook is the target in a new spam attack. The messages say that the recipient has received a message from Facebook with important information. Of course, this isn’t true.
Spam message claming "Important information" from Facebook
The message looks just like the original Facebook messages. When clicking the link that appear to go to Facebook the user is instead sent to a web shop with fake pills other not unwanted products from “The Canadian Pharmacy”.
Classical "pharmacy" site selling fake Viagra, Cializ and other pills
Normally these sites is located on different domains that eventually get blocked by content filters in browsers and proxy servers after a while. When this happens they move the site to a new domain names and send out new spam messages. And how do SpamDrain handle these messages? Sign up and try for your self 🙂
Spam appearing like Twitter e-mail updates
Maybe you have seen the spam messages that looks just like a normal update from Twitter? The design and texts are identical to the Twitter original, informing you that you have 3 new messages or that someone has started to follow you. However, when you click the link that appears to go to Twitter, you end up at some drug store that sells these famous blue pills – or at least a cheap copy of them. Continue reading
Focus on scalability, stability and user experience
Lately we have been working hard on handling the recent growth we have had. As you probably have noticed we have had some stability problems and we apologize for that. The last weeks we have made some changes to our infrastructure and started to migrate to new servers. This work will increase performance and provide better fail over than before. We hope this work will be finished within the next 2 – 3 weeks. We’re expecting to carry out the remaining changes without any disruptions to the service.
As a necessary step we have also moved some of our system to the cloud. This will improve the performance of our database servers and will also let us handle backups more efficiently.
In parallel with this work we have also worked on making minor changes to improve the experience of the overall service, such as improving your SpamDrain reports, adding support for payments in USD and support for payments through Paypal. We have also updated our price lists so they are easier to read. The next step on the web site is to make the sign up and on boarding as easy as in our mobile applications. That will be exciting work and hopefully we will be able to help even more people to get rid of annoying and time consuming spam messages.
Until next time – we wish you e-mail peace of mind and hope that you continue reporting your spam to us. That’s what makes the SpamDrain service so fantastic!
SpamDrain Android app now available in Android Market
As a result of the success with our iPhone application we have now released our first version of SpamDrain for Android phones. As for the iPhone application, the Android version gives users the opportunity to sign up for SpamDrain and get started with the filtering of their e-mail.
The application is free and can be used by anyone with a SpamDrain account as well to view some statistics of your account and basic information about your subscription.
SpamDrain iPhone app available in App Store
SpamDrain iPhone Application is now available in App Store. Please give us feedback what you would like to see in the application.
The application enables iPhone users to easily sign up to SpamDrain and get the spam filtering started. When logged on to the application you see statistics for your account and some basic information about your subscription. We hope to add more value to the application during 2010.
Virus and spam levels back to normal again
As we earlier reported virus levels have been rather higher than normal lately, but this now seem to have changed. We now see that virus level is back below 1 % which is more normal. Furthermore the dominating viruses aren’t actually viruses but phishing attempts. Continue reading
Google accounts sending spam to contacts in address book
Have you experienced that spam messages are sent from your address? I can guarantee you that you’re not alone. This happens to all of us. The reason is that the protocol used for sending e-mail, SMTP, is a fairly simple protocol designed in the very beginning of the internet’s history. Anyone may basically put any e-mail address in the From field when sending a message. Spammers use this a lot to make it appear like a friend or a colleague is sending you an important message. Continue reading
One e-mail virus for every tenth valid message
The last 5-6 weeks we have seen an increase of viruses blocked by the SpamDrain filter. The virus proportion has raised to levels around 2 – 3 %. This doesn’t sound much but compare this 0.2 -1 % for previous weeks. Two per cent corresponds to 15,000 viruses per week for our customers only. Since the spam proportion is around 80 % it means that for every tenth valid message there is a virus e-mail. Imagine the damage all these viruses could have made. Continue reading